Orijin

Friday, 23 January 2015

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has rejected
the recently releasedWest African Examination
Council(WAEC) result of All
Progressives Congress (APC) Presidential candidate, Muhammadu
Buhari saying that it was forged.

The PDP, speaking via a
statement released by the Director of Media and Publicity of the Goodluck
Jonathan Campaign Organization, Femi Fani-Kayode said that the document was
“forged, manipulated and fraudulently procured”.

The statement reads:

Gentlemen of the Press,

Yesterday, 21st of January, 2014, the
Presidential candidate of the All Progressive Congress, Gen Muhammadu Buhari
addressed a Press Conference where he attempted to explain the series of
controversies surrounding his academic qualifications especially the Secondary
School Certificate.

Again, the APC candidate, rather than provide a
conclusive proof that he possesses this minimum qualification, went into a
session of blame game and shifting of what ordinarily ought to be his personal
responsibility as he said and I quote “I have formally requested my old school,
Provisional Secondary School Katsina, which is now known as Government College,
Katsina, to make available the Schools copy of the result of the Cambridge West
African Schools Certificate.”

It is unfortunate that the more Gen Buhari tries
to extricate himself from the crisis, the more he stumbles into a new phase in
the unfolding narrative of his obvious complicity in a matter that borders on
perjury and which has called his avowed integrity to question.

It is quite unfortunate that a few hours after
Gen Buhari’s Press conference, some documents appeared on various Media
platforms purporting to be the APC candidate’s results released by his old
school.

Having carefully studied the statement of Result
signed by the “school principal” and an “examination officer” of the Government
College, Katsina, as well as the attached document titled University of
Cambridge West Africa School Certificate 1961, we wish to make the following
observations and comments:

The results sheet which was attributed to the
Cambridge examination body is clearly a super imposition of one document on
another as you will shortly see in the enlarged image of the result sheet as
published. The column lines on the part where names are printed do not align
with the blank columns while there is an introduction of extraneous lines on
some other columns.

The document contains an obvious alteration on
the Mathematics column of the candidate, Mohamed Buhari, who was assumed to
have scored an “F” in the subject. This raises a very fundamental issue of
validity in view of the fact that the accompanying result sheet states that
“any alteration or erasure renders this statement of Results invalid.” This is
the standard practice in all interpretation of documents especially academic
records. The question we put to Gen Buhari and his party is whether this
alteration was done by the University of Cambridge.

One of the footnotes on the document purportedly
issued by the University of Cambridge says “the results of this candidate in
all subjects except English Language have been carried forward from the 1960
examination.” The question arising from this is: When exactly did Buhari sit
for all the other subjects claimed to have been passed in the Secondary School
Examination?

Our conclusion from all these is that the
documents purportedly released by Government College (Pilot) Katsina, upon
which the APC Presidential candidates hopes to bury the doubt about his
eligibility for next month’s election are forged, manipulated and fraudulently
procured. They are therefore untenable in fact and in law.

We do not know who the authors and masterminds of
this forgery are but whoever they are, we urge them to come forward and be
identified.

If they fail to come forward voluntarily, we
hereby call on the Police and other security Agencies to seek them out, find
them, arrest them, interrogate them and prosecute them in accordance with the
laws of the land.

We reiterate our call on Gen Buhari to submit
himself to the police to answer charges of perjury, having lied on oath about
his academic qualifications. This is what a man who claims to represent
integrity and due process ought to do in this situation.